Cathy Hand spent her late 20s and early 30s working at a local winery before pivoting to a career in the tech industry. She had always dreamed of returning to the wine industry someday, and when she and her daughter Justine Recor began studying for sommelier certification, she fell back in love. Hand quit the tech industry, and the mother-daughter team opened Cellar & Scholar in 2024.
Hand and Recor, both fully certified sommeliers, focus on buying healthy wine that’s good to the earth, as well as to farmers from around the world. Their wines are sustainable, organic, biodynamic and feature no additives.
“When you take your first sip of genuinely good wine, a few different things can happen,” Hand says. “One, you can go, ‘It’s not for me.’ Two, ‘I really like wine. Maybe this is something I can have.’ Or, ‘Oh my God, this is now my life,’ which is what happened to a handful of us. You take that first sip, and it transforms you.”…